Theater review: 'No Child' at American Repertory Theatre

Friday

Nov 30, 2007 at 12:01 AMNov 30, 2007 at 12:02 AM

With only the jut of her jaw or the thrust of a hip, Nilaja Sun creates a quick silver gallery of high-school misfits whom she’s trying to educate through theater, in her one-woman show at the American Repertory Theatre.

Constance Gorfinkle

With only the jut of her jaw or the thrust of a hip, Nilaja Sun creates a quick silver gallery of high-school misfits whom she’s trying to educate through theater, in her one-woman show at the American Repertory Theatre.

Titled “No Child”, an ironic reference to President Bush’s disappointing educational initiative for disenfranchised school children, the play is based on Sun’s own experiences with such youngsters in the New York City public school system.

No doubt, this talented, Obie-winning performer could have drawn on any number of examples to dramatize, but she’s managed to whittle the cast down to a handful of attitudinizing, brazen and ultimately vulnerable kids, whom she’s encouraging to try to beat the odds of their existences by introducing them to the stage, that eternal looking-glass into a world beyond their stultifying neighborhoods. The vehicle for that is an 18th-century play about Australian prisoners who themselves are trying to put on a play.

Into the mix Sun has added the timid teacher whose students she’s borrowing for this production, the school’s tough principal who long ago lost her idealism to the terrible conditions of her hopeless job, and a world-weary janitor who provides context for the situation that now exists.

A small woman of amazing energy, wearing a white shirt and blue pants, her hair a spiky crown of short dreadlocks, Sun holds the stage at the Loeb Drama Center with a performance that is both sad and funny. Like that other fierce monologist, Anna Deveare Smith, she delineates her very different characters with just a few deft strokes, which, in only a second or two, make clear whose persona she has just assumed. Most remarkable she has given at least one of her characterizations an arc, a boy – perhaps her toughest challenge – whose horizon she might dare hope has broadened through this experience.

Under Hal Brooks’ direction, “No Child” moves along at a lively clip that nevertheless doesn’t cheat on the real tragedies underlying the kids’ often amusing antics and irreverence. Indeed, the barren quality of their lives is signaled the moment the show’s harsh lights come up to reveal the meager set designed by Narelle Sissons – a checker-board linoleum floor, upon which are scattered aluminum-framed chairs. It is in this rude box – with Sun’s help – that the kids must find enough inspiration to escape their certain destinies.

Whether any of them do could be the subject of another show. It is enough that “No Child” leaves open that possibility.